Jim Carrey to Star in Kidding Comedy, Ordered to Series at Showtime

Showtime has ordered to series Kidding, a new half-hour comedy starring Jim Carrey, TVLine has learned. The series will reunite Carrey with Oscar winner Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), who is on board to direct the 10-episode first season.

In Kidding, Carrey plays Jeff, a beloved children’s television star who has turned his role as “Mr. Pickles” into a multi-million dollar branding empire. “When this beloved personality’s family – wife, two sons, sister and father – begins to implode, Jeff finds no fairy tale or fable or puppet will guide him through this crisis, which advances faster than his means to cope,” the official logline reads. “The result: a kind man in a cruel world faces a slow leak of sanity as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.”

Said Showtime Networks president David Nevins in a statement, “No one inhabits a character like Jim Carrey, and this role – which is like watching Humpty Dumpty after the fall – is going to leave television audiences wondering how they went so long without him. With his Eternal Sunshine partner Michel Gondry on board to direct, we are on our way to a magnetic, volcanic and emotional viewing experience.”

Kidding extends Carrey’s relationship with Showtime, where he also serves as an EP on the recently renewed I’m Dying Up Here. Though he has long since established himself as a movie star, he first rose to fame in the early 1990s on Fox’s long-running sketch-comedy series In Living Color.